A wide variety of containers for storing media (magnetic tape cassette, compact disc, digital audio tape, etc.) boxes have been proposed and are in use. The vast majority of such media box containers are formed of brittle plastics, such as polystyrene. While relatively inexpensive, containers formed of brittle plastics are easily broken when dropped on a hard surface or in some other manner subjected to a high impact force.
In addition to being brittle, the vast majority of previously developed containers for storing media boxes loosely hold the media boxes to be stored. In order to prevent media boxes from falling out of such containers should the containers be inadvertently oriented such that gravity could cause the media boxes to fall out of the container, i.e., inverted, many prior art containers for storing media boxes include covers. U.S. Pat. No. 4,366,903 entitled "Magazine For Magnetic Tape Cassettes" describes a trough-shaped cassette storage container that overcomes the gripping problem by providing strips of resilient materials adhesively attached to the inner walls of the trough. Rather than being formed of polystyrene, the trough is formed of polyvinyl chloride, that allows the side walls of the trough to be resiliently forced apart when a magnetic tape cassette is to be inserted or removed. Among other disadvantages, the cassette storage container described U.S. Pat. No. 4,366,903 is more expensive than desirable due to the material and labor costs involved in attaching strips of resilient material to the inner surface of trough side walls.
The present invention is directed to providing a media box storage container that overcomes the foregoing disadvantages of previously-developed media and media box storage containers.